Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant is one fantastic basketball player and a graduate of the school of hard knocks with his 17 years of NBA experience.

Apparently, he knows all there is to know about college, too, after his recent business class appearances at Boston College and the University of Miami. And despite never having attended a university before starting his NBA career. His point: Basketball players should be able to jump from preps to the pros, just as he did in 1996, without having to spend any time in college.

Lakers guard Kobe Bryant (AP Photo)

“I’m always a firm believer in us being able to make our own decisions, especially as it pertains to going out and working and having a job,” Bryant told reporters. “You should be able to go out there and make your own choices.”

So despite sentiment from coaches including Kentucky’s John Calipari to pursue a two-and-done structure for college basketball, Kobe’s stance is none-and-done.

“If you do the numbers and you look at the count you probably see players who came out of high school that were much more successful on average than players that went to college for a year or two years," Bryant said. "It seems like the system really isn’t teaching players anything if you go to college. ‘If you go to college, you play, you showcase, and you come to the pros.’ Well, that’s always been the big argument, as a player you have to go to college, you have to develop your skills and so forth and so on and then you come to the league.

“We kind of got sold on that, sold on that dream a little bit. Fortunately, I didn’t really listen much to it, neither did KG, neither did LeBron. I think that worked out pretty well for all three of us.”

Former NBA player and now Arizona assistant coach Damon Stoudamire would fully disagree with Bryant’s assessment. Stoudamire told Sporting News that when he scouted the NBA draft as an assistant with the Memphis Grizzlies, he could tell when kids who left after just one year of college weren’t even ready to play a “man’s game.” He knows how much his four-year career with the Wildcats taught him so many things that helped him earn over $100 million in his career.

“I would go to Chicago and help with the interview process with a lot of guys,” Stoudamire said. “To be honest with you, a lot of kids, they really don’t have a clue to what it took to make it in the NBA. They thought it was a joke. I don’t think they really understood that it’s a man’s game. The NBA is a man’s game. If you’re not all the way in, and you’re looking at it as a paycheck, then you’re probably you’re not going to make it.”

Bryant can point to the mega-success of himself and those two other guys, but they were exceptions, not the norm. And when you had NBA teams believing in Kwame Brown, Jonathan Bender, DaSagana Diop and Shaun Livingston, among others, the system was broke.

There is value in education, both on and off the court.

“It’s not a case of getting drafted and making it in the pros, it’s a case of how long you’re gonna stay in the pros,” Stoudamire said.